Mandela's world has gone awry

I cannot remember exactly when Nelson Mandela entered my consciousness, but I remember the giddiness I felt when they were forced to turn him loose after 27 years of captivity.

I remember, after his release, how the stories and the songs that before had passively comforted me exploded with a kinetic energy that shattered the skepticism I had about my place in the world.

To me, he was David slaying Goliath with a sling and stone. He was Bob Marley's "Duppy Conqueror."

"… the bars could not hold me

force could not control me..."

Today, however, I am afraid that we tend to view the lives of individuals like Mandela, Gandhi and Martin Luther King as miracles to be celebrated, rather than road maps to a better world.

And I suspect that Mr. Mandela, now that he has passed, would prefer us replacing the tributes we are paying him with a period of prolonged reflection.

We are familiar with the conditions that ignited his militancy.

We know that the government of his country, a white minority, legalized a series of racial policies that essentially denationalized some 9 million non-whites and created separate facilities for whites and non-whites.

Marriages between whites and people of other races were banned. Sexual relations between black and white South Africans were prohibited. More than 80 percent of the country's land was reserved for the white minority. Non-whites were denied participation in the national government and could not travel without documents permitting their presence in restricted areas. These racial separation laws were brutally enforced.

We know that under apartheid, in a country of 4.5 million whites and 19 million blacks, there was one doctor for every 44,000 blacks compared to 1 for every 400 whites. Infant mortality for blacks was 20 percent in the urban areas and 40 percent in the rural areas, compared to 2.76 percent for whites.

But why or how did Mr. Mandela, after being subjected to such oppression, became such a compassionate and forgiving statesman?

What does it mean that apartheid was legalized after World War II, a war in which some 60 million to 80 million people were killed, including 6 million Jews by a German dictator who sought to establish a master race?

And why did a post-World War II-enlightened world allowed such conditions to remain in place for more than 50 years?

Why did Israel, after the experience of the Holocaust, feel that its survival depended on maintaining a close and long lasting military and economic relationship with the government of South Africa, a government that was repressing 9 million of its people?

Why was it that when the U.S Congress in 1986 banned new U.S. investments in South Africa, sales to the police and the military, and certain types of bank loans, it had to override the veto of then President Ronald Reagan?

Mr. Reagan's supporters will rightly tell you that he didn't support the apartheid state but that he felt economic sanctions would hurt the country's black residents more than the minority government. But with such an approach, would Mandela have been freed, or would he have died in jail?

As we mourn Mr. Mandela, we should be asking ourselves these and other questions.

"Honour belongs to those who never forsake the truth even when things seem dark and grim, who try over and over again, who are never discouraged by insults, humiliation and even defeat," Mr. Mandela once wrote to his wife, Winne Mandela, from his prison on Robben Island.

The real tragedy of Mr. Mandela's passing is that there is a dearth in this world of his honor.